After a more than a four-year hiatus, Paradise Hotel will be re-opening for business.
|
ADVERTISEMENT
|
However rather than air on Fox, Paradise Hotel's new episodes will be broadcast on two other Fox networks -- MyNetworkTV, the new over-the-air broadcast network that Fox launched last fall after last year's surprise The CW network launch left many former The WB and UPN affiliates (including nearly a dozen Fox-owned stations) homeless, and Fox Reality, the all-reality digital cable and satellite TV network Fox launched in May 2005.
Paradise Hotel's new edition will reportedly follow the same format that the show used during its original run and feature singles of the opposite sex living, playing and hooking-up with one another in an exclusive resort. Each week, the pairings change and the housemates evict one of their fellow contestants. Similar to Paradise Hotel's first season, the new edition will film at an "undisclosed tropical location" (which, at least in the original edition, turned out to be Acapulco, Mexico).
"All of our research has shown that Paradise Hotel is a brand that reality viewers are desperate to see on TV again," Fox Reality president David Lyle told Broadcasting & Cable about the decision to bring Paradise Hotel back again.
Back in 2003, Paradise Hotel's strong summer ratings performance resulted in Fox executives all but formally announcing their intentions to air a Summer 2004 edition of Paradise Hotel, however rather than actually doing so, they instead decided to attempt to capitalize on the format's popularity by leveraging it into a new "never-ending" year-round Forever Eden reality series that flopped and was canceled only seven episodes after its Spring 2005 launch. Fox then contemplated bringing the original Paradise Hotel format back for another run in the summer of 2005, but eventually decided against it.
In early March, MyNetworkTV announced that after seeing its original first-year plan to broadcast American adaptations of foreign telenovelas shows fail in the ratings, it had decided to stop developing scripted programming of any kind and would instead begin to focus on lower-cost reality television programming.
"The five major networks spend enormous amounts on development and I don't think we can outdo what they do in [comedies or dramas]," MyNetworkTV president Greg Meidel told TV Week. "But I think there's some great reality projects out there that are available."
Paradise Hotel's new revival will be co-produced by Fox Reality and MyNetworkTV, with both the cable/satellite channel and the broadcast network sharing the show's costs. Although Fox Reality has already produced several original reality shows of its own, Paradise Hotel will mark the network's first co-production.
Mentorn USA, the same production company that produced Paradise Hotel when it aired on Fox in 2003, will return to produce new episodes with Dan Barraclough and David Leach serving as executive producers, according to Broadcasting & Cable.
About The Author: Christopher Rocchio
